In wireless communications, a handover of a user equipment (UE) such as a mobile device occurs when a link quality of one cell signal between the UE and a serving base station decreases and/or a link quality of another cell signal between the UE and possible target cell(s) increases. A possible target cell may be the same carrier frequency provided by different base station than the serving base station, a different component carrier (i.e. different carrier frequency) of the serving or different base station, or a different radio access technology of the serving or different base station. The loss in link quality of the cell signal between the UE and the serving base station may be due to various factors such as path loss, slow fading, fast fading, noise, etc.
Interactions between the various factors that cause a decline in the link quality of the cell signal between the UE and the base station complicates a handover of the UE (e.g., from one component carrier to another component carrier and/or from the serving base station to the target base station) at a point of handover, such that the UE will experience interruption in services. For example, an application server (e.g., a YouTube server) and/or the Transport Control Protocol (TCP) stack have no knowledge of the state of the network in which the UE operates (e.g., Long Term Evolution (LTE) network), where the state of the network is indicative of how much throughput or bandwidth is available for the UE. Disruption at the TCP layer leads to server application layer rate loss, spurious re-transmissions, duplicate acknowledgement (ACK) reception, slow start, etc., which negatively impact (cause interruptions in services) the experience of a user at the UE during a handover process in which the serving of the UE is transferred from the serving base station to the target base station.